Homeoke

Karaoke at home, without a karaoke machine

There are two quite different things people mean by singing at home, and they want opposite products. One is a room full of people taking turns. The other is one person, one song, and the same chorus eight times until it sits right. This is about telling them apart before you spend money on the wrong one.

If you want a party, buy the machine

Let us settle this first, because there is no point reading on if it is you.

A dedicated machine is genuinely good at the party. It arrives with a catalogue of tens of thousands of songs you can search in ten seconds, which is exactly as long as a room full of people will wait. It comes with a microphone that is built to be dropped, and a second one so two people can share. It puts the words on the television, where everybody can see them, and it makes the whole thing a shared event rather than something happening on somebody's lap.

If that is the evening you are picturing, nothing below is going to serve you better. Buy the machine and enjoy it.

What a machine cannot do

Three things, and whether they matter to you is the whole decision.

• The song you actually want is often not in it. Every catalogue is a licensing deal, so it is deep on the standards and thin everywhere else. B sides, anything in a language the machine was not built for, last month's release, the specific recording rather than a cover of it. If the song you want to sing is the reason you are doing this, a catalogue is a lottery.
• It is in the original singer's key, not yours. This is the quiet one. Most songs are recorded at the top of the range of the person who recorded them, because that is where a voice sounds most alive, and it is why so many people conclude they cannot sing when what they cannot do is sing that song at that pitch. A machine gives you the track as it was pressed.
• You never hear yourself back. The evening ends and nothing is kept. That is fine for a party and useless for getting better, because the gap between how you sound in your head and how you sound in the room is the single most useful thing you can find out, and you can only find it out by listening.

What a phone does instead

The alternative is to stop starting from a catalogue and start from the song. You already have the file, or you can get it. The phone does the rest:

• Takes the original voice out of the recording, on the phone itself, so what is left is the band. Not a cover version and not an approximation. That exact recording, minus the singer.
• Moves the key without moving the tempo, so you can put the song where your voice actually lives rather than where somebody else's did.
• Shows the words in time, so you are singing rather than reading ahead.
• Records you, with the backing, and keeps it. Even without headphones, where the microphone hears the room as well as you.

The trade is obvious once you say it plainly. You give up instant access to a catalogue, and you get any song, in your key, with a recording at the end.

What it costs you

Being straight about this is more useful than selling it, so:

• You bring the song. There is no catalogue to browse. An audio file has to come from somewhere you already have it, and if that sounds like friction, it is, and it is the price of not being limited to somebody's licensing deal.
• Separation takes real seconds. Not instant. On a recent phone a four minute song is done in around twenty seconds, and on an older one it runs closer to the length of the song. Once, per song, and then it is saved.
• Some songs do not come out clean. A clear lead voice over a sparse backing separates beautifully. A dense mix with heavy reverb and backing harmonies leaves a trace of the original singer. Why that happens, and what to do about it.
• It is one phone and one singer. Nobody is queueing. That is a feature if you are practising and a limitation if you have friends over.

So which one are you?

If the answer is "I want the room to have a good time", the machine wins and it is not close.

If the answer is "there is a particular song I want to be able to sing properly", then a catalogue you cannot choose from and a key you cannot move are the two things standing in your way, and both of them are what a phone fixes. You are not really after a party in a box. You are after a practice room, and it turns out that fits in a pocket.